Video: 10 Vampyr tips to prevent an undead apocalypse

I was going to call this article ‘10 Vampyr tips to stop you sucking at sucking’, but this doesn’t reflect my experience with the game. As you’ll have read in Alec’s delightful Vampyr review, the act of drinking blood is a wicked temptation. It’s the quickest way to slurp up XP and lower the combat difficulty, but comes at the cost of depopulating the world of potential stories and causing regions of the map to sink into enemy-infested chaos. It’s better to stretch your non-slurped XP as far as possible then, so I’m offering advice about surviving with as few necks bitten as possible.

If you take anything away from the video, it’s that you really don’t have to drink the people of London dry. I’m pretty sure you can make it to the end without a single victim, if you choose to live frugally. This means focusing the experience points you do have – from completing missions and grinding away at common enemies – into a few key parts of the skill tree.

As I explain in the video, biting is hugely important, as this one move does damage, restocks blood and restores health. Yes, you have to stun an enemy first, but if you funnel resources into improving your Priwen Stake (the video explains where to find it) and also pump XP into stamina upgrades, you’ll eventually get to a point where you can repeatedly stab an enemy, drink from them and then repeat the process.

Pushing out of your comfort zone – that is, leaving the beaten track of story missions – will introduce you to high level enemies. Even as a feeble beginner vampire you can take most baddies down in a one-on-one fight (go in for a bite and them zap them with Shadow Mist to get an early dose of damage in), which lets you collect rarer material drops earlier. This lets you develop your tools; a good way to strengthen Reid without XP investment.

Of course, this is just the direction I’ve taken my own devious doctor. I’ll admit that my low XP approach means I haven’t been able to play around with some of the more exotic vamp powers. So do share your favoured character builds in the discussion below. I didn’t play much with avoidance tactics (invisibility, etc), for example, so do let me know how that is working out for you.

Now look deep into my mesmerising eyes as I tell you to go and subscribe to the RPS YouTube channel for more of this kind of thing. Oh, and get me a Wispa while you’re at it.

I'm the only dude on RPS who doesn't own a luscious beard, so whatever you do, don't pick me in a game of RPS Guess Who? When I'm not straining to push more stubble through my face, I make videos for the Rock Paper Shotgun YouTube channel.